Memory Paths Intro

When the viewer first enters the Memory Paths (Zoe’s Time Machine) website, a typed introduction will appear for them to read. This introduction will establish the context for the interactive clock and its memory pods. Here’s a draft for my intro. Any feedback would be great.

Memory Paths

Currently, physics does not allow for time travel to the past or future. In order to visit your ancestors or travel to the year 2020, scientists would have to harness the power of a star and you would have to travel faster than the speed of light. And even if time machines did exist, you would not be able to travel farther back in time than the point of their creation. But you travel back in time every day, and not solely by remembering an event that occurred a long time ago. This time travel is involuntary.

Perhaps when you think of your childhood, nostalgia distorts the positive aspects of your youth and dims the more difficult memories. If you have a lot of work to do on a given day, you might reminisce about being in grade school and think back to when you took time for granted. On a rewarding day, you may revisit that same time in the past, but will instead focus on the fact that your outlook was not mature enough to appreciate what has brought you satisfaction today.

While your past is often regarded as theoretically cemented, it changes every day – its fluidity is the only constant. Memory will always refine particular moments and blur others, but the combination of alterations is as infinite as the parallel universes that exist in theoretical physics. And because by the end of tomorrow evening you will have garnered several more new memories, your memory’s collection of refractions only increases.

HALF-REMEMBERED STORIES

In July 2010, we will be rolling out a multi-media exhibition about lost people, lost places, and the quest to reclaim lost memory. In preparation for this exhibit, we've invited 16 young Jews, ages 15 to 25, to blog.